Stephen John Ditko was an American comics artist and writer best known for being co-creator of Marvel superhero Spider-Man and creator of Doctor Strange.
42 Facts About Steve Ditko
2.
Steve Ditko made notable contributions to the character of Iron Man with the character's iconic red and yellow design being revolutionized by Ditko.
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Steve Ditko studied under Batman artist Jerry Robinson at the Cartoonist and Illustrators School in New York City.
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Steve Ditko began his professional career in 1953, working in the studio of Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, beginning as an inker and coming under the influence of artist Mort Meskin.
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Steve Ditko went on to contribute much significant work to Marvel.
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Steve Ditko was artist for the first 38 issues of The Amazing Spider-Man, co-creating much of the Spider-Man supporting characters and villains with Stan Lee.
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In 1966, after being the exclusive artist on The Amazing Spider-Man and the "Doctor Strange" feature in Strange Tales, Steve Ditko left Marvel for a variety of reasons, including creative differences and unpaid royalties.
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Steve Ditko continued to work for Charlton and DC Comics, including a revamp of the long-running character the Blue Beetle, and creating or co-creating the Question, the Creeper, Shade the Changing Man, and Hawk and Dove.
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Steve Ditko began contributing to small independent publishers, where he created Mr A, a hero reflecting the influence of Ayn Rand's philosophy of Objectivism.
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Steve Ditko largely declined to give interviews, saying he preferred to communicate through his work.
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Steve Ditko was inducted into the comics industry's Jack Kirby Hall of Fame in 1990, and into the Will Eisner Award Hall of Fame in 1994.
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Stephen John Steve Ditko was born on November 2,1927 in Johnstown, Pennsylvania.
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Steve Ditko's parents were second-generation Americans: children of Rusyn Byzantine Catholic immigrants from the former Austro-Hungarian Empire.
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Steve Ditko's father, Stefan, was an artistically talented master carpenter at a steel mill and his mother, Anna, a homemaker.
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Robinson found the young student "a very hard worker who really focused on his drawing" and someone who "could work well with other writers as well as write his own stories and create his own characters", and he helped Steve Ditko acquire a scholarship for the following year.
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Shortly afterward, Steve Ditko found work at the studio of writer-artists Joe Simon and Jack Kirby, who had created Captain America and other characters.
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Steve Ditko then began a long association with the Derby, Connecticut, publisher Charlton Comics, a low-budget division of a company best known for song-lyric magazines.
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Steve Ditko was allowed a great deal of creative freedom at Charlton due to very little editorial interference.
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Steve Ditko first went on hiatus from the company, and comics altogether, in mid-1954, when he contracted tuberculosis and returned to his parents' home in Johnstown to recuperate.
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Steve Ditko returned to Charlton afterward and experimented with various drawing styles and genres in series such as Tales of The Mysterious Traveler and This Magazine is Haunted.
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Lee turned to Steve Ditko, who developed a visual motif Lee found satisfactory, although Lee would later replace Steve Ditko's original cover with one penciled by Kirby.
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From 1958 to 1968, Steve Ditko shared a Manhattan studio at 43rd Street and Eighth Avenue with noted fetish artist Eric Stanton, an art-school classmate.
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Increasingly irritated by his perception that he was not receiving his due or proper compensation, Steve Ditko demanded credit for the plotting he was contributing under the Marvel Method.
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Steve Ditko contributed some of his most surrealistic work to the comic book and gave it a disorienting, hallucinogenic quality.
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Whereas Kirby's stuff clearly appealed to a boy's sensibility because there was so much raw power, Steve Ditko's work was really delicate and cartoony.
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You can always recognize anything that Steve Ditko designed because it's always flowery.
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Steve Ditko worked on the second and third issues of Tiger-Man and the third issue of Morlock 2001, with Bernie Wrightson inking.
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Steve Ditko returned to DC Comics in 1975, creating a short-lived title, Shade, the Changing Man.
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Steve Ditko revived the Creeper and did such various other jobs as a short Demon backup series in 1979, created The Odd Man and stories in DC's horror and science-fiction anthologies.
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Steve Ditko returned to Marvel in 1979, taking over Jack Kirby's Machine Man, drawing The Micronauts and Captain Universe, and continuing to freelance for the company into the late 1990s.
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In 1992 Steve Ditko worked with writer Will Murray to produce one of his last original characters for Marvel Comics, the superheroine Squirrel Girl, who debuted in Marvel Super-Heroes vol.
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Steve Ditko's Strange Avenging Tales was announced as a quarterly series from Fantagraphics Books, although it only ran one issue due to publicly unspecified disagreements between Ditko and the publisher.
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In 2010 they published a new edition of the 1973 Mr A comic and a selection of Steve Ditko covers in The Cover Series.
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Steve Ditko had a nephew who became an artist, named Steve Ditko.
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Steve Ditko supported neither George W Bush nor John Kerry in the 2004 presidential election due to believing neither would prioritize them.
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Steve Ditko said in 2012 that he had made no income on the four Spider-Man films released to that time.
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However, a neighbor of Steve Ditko stated that Steve Ditko received royalty checks.
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Steve Ditko had once told his Charlton co-worker Pete Morisi, a policeman who moonlighted as a comic book artist, that he envied Morisi for being able to arrest criminals.
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Steve Ditko later expressed his Objectivist views even further with the Question, who criticized the apathy of the public toward right and wrong, and Mr A, who refused to save villains from death.
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Steve Ditko was found unresponsive in his apartment in New York City on June 29,2018.
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Steve Ditko was pronounced dead at the age of 90, with the cause of death initially deemed as a result of a myocardial infarction, brought on by arteriosclerotic and hypertensive cardiovascular disease.
42.
Steve Ditko did give the two a selection of some comic books.